Arriving
in America the customs agent stamps my passport. “Have a nice day,” he says
and gives me the thumbs up. In a café on Ventura Boulevard the girl behind
the counter takes my order and smiles brightly. “Have a nice day,” she says
and gives me the thumbs up. Walking out into the blasting heat, a bum holds
out his hand. When I give him a buck he smiles widely, “have a nice day,” he
says and raises his thumb.

It’s as if these three
things: the cheeseburger grin, “have a nice day” and the thumbs up sign
constitute the sum total of just about every interaction with a stranger in
North America. But it is the thumbs up that transcends them all, the
ubiquitous sign language everyone understands. Politicians are especially
enamored with it. They raise their thumbs to accentuate the positive, to
affirm that all is well, and, I’m convinced, to distract your attention from
the reality happening just out of your peripheral vision. The raised thumb
of optimism, an ancient phallic emblem for masculine virility, is so common
it could be called the quintessential American symbol.

Especially in recent
months. Everyone from President Bush to the Humvee driving, social program
slashing California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger [1],
to the girl leaning over the ice-packed corpse of a tortured Iraqi, is
giving optimistic thumbs up. It makes sense. After all, to be American is be
optimistic, as if it were a god-given right to feel good. As a random
example, look at the furor recently when author E.L. Doctorow, who penned
Ragtime and City of God, gave a commencement address at Hofstra
University, sharply critical of George W Bush. After he was booed off the
stage the assistant vice-president for university relations Melissa Connolly
said, "We feel that first and foremost, the commencement is a celebration of
our graduates and their accomplishments.” She went on to apologize that
Doctorow’s speech had diminished the day for some of their graduates and
their families.

What she was really
saying was that campus is not the place to outline harsh realities,
especially if it make students unhappy, especially if it pops the bubble of
endemic optimism that is de rigeur in America.

It’s as though
optimism has become the only state of mind allowable in the land of the
happy ending. As though it’s unpatriotic not to have a nice day. The
pressure to be optimistic is greater than shame, greater than conscience.
You can see the triumph of optimism on the face of Lynndie England as she
points to the blanked out genitals of a captive Iraqi (as if the nudity and
not the smile was the rude thing). But as reports surface of similar
barbaric treatment of prisoners in jails across the country -- complete with
the same souvenir-type photos, the same optimistic grins on the faces of the
warders, and always the same thumbs up -- her behavior begins to look like
standard operating procedure, less a “bad apple” than a minion at the bottom
of a chain that commanded and approved of torture.

But still you wonder,
how could they do it? How could she, the new poster girl for all that is
wrong with America, have behaved in such a gloatingly depraved way? Perhaps
it’s partly optimism masquerading as moral correctness. The confidence that
optimism creates, blinding the individual. Certainly optimism has
intoxicated a supremely confident President and fueled a belief in the
rightness of his imperialistic crusade and in the infallibility of the
leadership.

So strong is the power
of optimism that it has become an antidote to that other awkward emotion:
doubt. Like a game of rock scissors paper; optimism appears to always trump
doubt, no matter what the macro situation beyond an individual’s control. It
is doubt, so the ethos goes, that is at the root of our personal failures;
not the jobless economic recovery, the sellout of the entire food chain to
corporations, the 456outright lies told or
endorsed by the president and his administration [2], the
widest gap between rich and poor in the democratic world [3],
the twin obsessions of faith and pornography (47% of Christians said porno
was a major problem in their homes). [4]

It’s not cancer -- now
the leading cause of death in Americans under 65 [5] or
the fact that 44 million of them can’t afford treatment of any kind (despite
the fact that the US spends more per capita on health-care services than any
other OECD country), [6] it’s not a system that is
building prisons and filling them with ever lower definitions of criminality
faster than it’s funding education [7] or an education
that ensures the young are good for cannon fodder or a McJob in the service
industry (where, under a new proposal flipping burgers will be reclassified
as manufacturing rather than service). [8]

To remain optimistic,
in the face of such things, is the most patriotic thing an American can do.
It’s become the only way to let the world know you’ve got with the program.
Perhaps it’s the only way to convince yourself. Remember in the weeks after
9/11 the president exhorting his people to spend, to proclaim freedom by
running up credit card debt, to use consumption as the means of returning to
a positive, optimistic state of mind that would then, most importantly, keep
the economy pumping?

In 1798 English
clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus wrote an essay on optimism. He linked it to
the progress that characterized the growing power of the industrial
revolution to expropriate the goods and services of the natural environment.
It is optimism, Malthus noted, that fuels growth. Today it is the belief in
limitless growth that drives not just the United States but also every
Western nation.

But is there a tipping
point, a time when continuous growth finally outstrips supply in a finite
world? In 1978 Malthusian expert John F. Rohe documented the very real
downsides of unending growth: loss of biodiversity, the consumption of
finite natural resources and the pollution of our environment. We are
moving, he said, to the collective brink of ecological collapse from which,
even with all our technological solutions we cannot recover. All this on the
tidal wave of optimism.

But what about
happiness? After all optimism is surely a precondition of happiness, the
very mark, in fact, of successful happiness, which is, after all, the
ultimate goal in today’s world. If being optimistic, even the
fake-it-till-you-make-it variety, makes the difference, then what can be
wrong with that?

American social critic
Christopher Lasch confronted this problem. “The progressive credo has
fostered an “easy optimism,” he said, but noted he saw nothing in optimism
to serve as “an effective antidote to despair.” While Lasch, who died in
1994, did not make the connection, perhaps that accounts for the fact that
today one in every eight Americans is on some form of anti-depressant.

Lasch had a simple
prescription. Americans, he asserted, were missing the traditional virtue of
hope. “Hope," he wrote in
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics,
in 1991, “does not demand a belief in progress. Hope implies a deep-seated
trust in life. It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the
past. “Those who can ‘distinguish hopefulness’ from the more conventional
attitude known today as optimism,” Lasch averred, “can see why it serves us
better, in steering troubled waters ahead, than a belief in progress.”

And then there’s
Agathism. Unlike the unflappable smile and the thumbs up of the optimist
who blithely believes things will work out or that good is triumphing over
evil, the agathist accepts evil and misfortune but believes it is the
ultimate nature of things to tend toward the good and improve. In
There's A Word For It! The Grandiloquent Guide to Life by Charles
Harrington Elster, anagathist is described as being like an
optimist, but more rational and profound.

But
in contemplating optimism and its elevation to the most important attribute
of the world’s most powerful nation, its reliance on conscious ignorance,
relentless consumption and growth, on “have a nice day,” on cheeseburger
wide grins and of course thumbs up, you begin to feel the desperation that
characterized much of Lasch’s work. And you begin to wonder, as Lasch did,
if the denouement of the cult of optimism will come only as the result of
some ultimate confrontation in the future. Some event like the cataclysmic
climate change portrayed in this season’s blockbuster with an environmental
message, The Day After Tomorrow. For all its clumsiness and over
explication the film neatly sums up the optimist/agathist split. It is the
optimists who perish, drawn to their frozen deaths by a belief that things
always work out. Even the President is caught in a fatal climate change of
his own making. While the heroes, father and son, are fueled by trust, by a
rational understanding of the true situation, by the hope of love and
loyalty. A perfect Agathist moment. Imagine if it were true.